


my wife

by TheSuperDandy



Category: Luther (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-21
Updated: 2018-08-21
Packaged: 2019-06-30 15:08:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 472
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15754215
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheSuperDandy/pseuds/TheSuperDandy
Summary: He put his hands in his pockets to thwart the temptation to touch





	my wife

_Why did your wife turn her face from you, John?_ Alice had said to him. _Why would she do that? Is it because you shine so bright?_

He had always taken what Alice said lightly. She didn’t say words for the inherent truth in them – she said them for effect, always. He had known that. Twenty years on the force had prepared him for that.

And yet.

Even knowing what a psychopath might mean when they said _shine so bright_. Maybe because he knew what it meant.

*

 _My wife_ , he called her, just that one time. It was the perfect cover for an emotional phone call that everyone in the office had overheard. That wasn’t why he said it. That was the excuse for saying it. Just that one time.

*

He put his hands in his pockets to thwart the temptation to touch, at a crime scene. He did it without even thinking about it.

The first time Alice ever touched him she touched him on the cheek, in her apartment. It took a split second for his body to react, and it was a visceral, animal reaction. It was realising that he might be prey, that he had come closer than he thought. It was realising he felt her fingertips under his ribs, like she was fingering his muscular heart.

When she touched him again, in his apartment, she covered his heart with her whole palm and he put his hands in his pockets, without even thinking about it.

*

Those two, exposing words. They were lewd in a way no swearing could be, horrifying the way pools of blood weren’t. He buried them deep, without even letting himself feel them first. He buried them and shut them in by wearing armour and more shining armour over that. He buried them in a blonde pixie who smiled sunshine – and John, on the other side of an invisible divide, told himself he felt warm.

Then Marwood made him choose.

Marwood made him dig up the pale, sightless thing he’d worked so hard to cover up.

If he’d chosen Alice in the way Marwood wanted – that mawkish declaration of love that he seemed to need, over and over, because he could never make it himself again – the truth would have stayed buried forever. But he chose Alice in another way. He chose her for death, because only Alice, of everyone he’d ever known and loved, could handle it.

*

When they told him Alice really did die, the worst part was not knowing. He would never, ever be certain she was really dead. And she was either dead ( _Dying would be worse because, well, honestly, it is, isn’t it?_ ) or she had produced a body and teeth and finger prints in order to give him up. He couldn’t say for sure that death was worse.

 

 

 


End file.
